Making the Void Fruitful : : Yeats as spiritual seeker and Petrarchan lover / / Patrick J. Keane.

• VerfasserIn: Keane, Patrick J.,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, UK : : Open Book Publishers,, 2021.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (270 pages) :; illustrations
• Notes: Includes index.

Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats--widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century--this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet's long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats's vision of life and death. Through close reading of selected poems, the first section of Making the Void Fruitful assesses Yeats's spiritualised treatment of corporeal themes, exploring sex and eroticism as the expression of a duality inherent to his ontological and supernatural convictions. The power-producing tension in Yeats's work is not only intellectual but emotional. At its vital centre is his Muse: the beautiful political firebrand, Maud Gonne, whose activist Republican politics he considered his one real rival. Through close engagement with the poems and plays she inspired, the second section explores Yeats's complex relationship with Maud, an obsessive and unrequited love which he sublimated and transformed into the greatest body of Muse poetry since Petrarch, in whose tradition of spiritualized eroticism Yeats, perhaps the last of the great Romantics, was consciously writing. Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called 'the thinking of the body'. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats's oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W.B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations Acknowledgments Part One : W.B. Yeats as Spiritual Seeker ; General Prologue: The Thinking of the Body / Patrick Keane ; 1. Introduction: Bodily Decrepitude and the Imagination / Patrick Keane ; 2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism / Patrick Keane ; 3. The Seeker / Patrick Keane ; 4. The Byzantium Poems; Apocalypse in 'The Secret Rose' and 'The Second Coming' / Patrick Keane ; 5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption / Patrick Keane ; 6. Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult / Patrick Keane ; 7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things / Patrick Keane Part Two. Love's Labyrinth: Yeats as Petrarchan Poet (The Maud Gonne Poems) ; Preface to Part Two / Patrick Keane ; 8. Poet and Muse / Patrick Keane ; 9. Maud Gonne, and Yeats as Petrarchan Lover / Patrick Keane ; 10. The Poems: A Sampling / Patrick Keane ; 11. Rose, Wind, and the Seven Woods / Patrick Keane ; 12. Maud as Helen: The Green Helmet Poems / Patrick Keane ; 13. Responsibilities and The Wild Swans at Coole / Patrick Keane ; 14. A Bronze Head and Beyond / Patrick Keane ; 15. Thought Distracted: Man and the Echo, Politics, and Conclusion / Patrick Keane ; Eulogy: Harold Bloom (1930-2019) / Patrick Keane Select Bibliography Index.